"The world in a jug and the stopper in hand": 'Their Eyes' as blues performance

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Maria V. Johnson

In Their Eyes Hurston plays variations on the mule image of the blues. Janie's grandmother first articulates the social hierarchy which the mule image in the blues suggests:

"So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. . . . He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see." (29)

From relationship to relationship, Hurston repeats and responds to various aspects of this image. Janie, in her relationships both with Logan and with Jody, is married to escape muledom, and yet ironically soon finds herself treated like a mule. In both relationships, this is symbolized by her husband's purchase of a flesh-and-blood mule. In Janie's relationship with Tea Cake, however, as Sherley Anne Williams notes, Hurston turns the mule image of the blues around (Hurston, Their Eyes xv). Signifying on the tradition, Hurston replaces the mule relationship - an unequal, oppressive power relationship that keeps women in the "one-down" position-with a relationship in which Janie and Tea Cake work side by side as equals in the Everglades.

In Their Eyes, the mule image is associated both with oppressive white and male definitions of Black women, which Janie struggles to shed, and with the creativity of blues singers and storytellers - and hence with Janie's acquisition of voice. In Their Eyes, Hurston critiques the mule image of the blues, showing how white male definitions stifle the creativity of African American women. In Janie's relationship with Jody, the mule image embodies a double standard: Jody can participate in the storytelling concerning the mule; Janie cannot. But, while Janie is not allowed to "talk the mule," laugh at the mule-talk, or attend the mule's funeral within the story itself, when she tells her life-story to Pheoby, Janie not only talks the mule and "witnesses" the mule's funeral, she also creates a new mule story of a second funeral presided over by the buzzards (96-97). Janie's "performance" of the buzzards' mule funeral utilizes blues techniques including personification, hyperbole, and a repeated call-and-response structure to signify on Joe's mule funeral and to expose the reality behind the appearance of Joe's life. We see in Joe's presiding over the first mule funeral, as in the lamp lighting ceremony, that the mule, like the lamp, is a symbol of Joe's material power and control. In the first mule funeral, Joe and the town metaphorically laud the owner of the mule (Joe) and his material strength, while in the second, Janie and the buzzards expose his physical weakness. In the second funeral, when the presiding buzzard asks, "What killed this man?" and the chorus answers, "Bare bare fat," Janie alludes to and anticipates in the telling of her story the circumstances of Joe's death. Thus, the buzzard story becomes a posthumous signifyin(g) gesture on Jody.(5) Ultimately, then, by telling her own story, including her own variations on the mule's funeral, Janie does participate in the mule-talk, just as Hurston, by telling Janie's story, participates in the male-controlled and dominated tradition of written literature.